The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) had admittedly taken over the Web sites of the Washington Post, Time and CNN on Thursday. The group was also able to hack the Associated Press, The Oinion, BBC, NPR, Thomson Reuters, the Financial Times and the New York Post.

The group SEA had admitted their attack through their Twitter account.

The Web site infiltration was conducted by the SEA through hacking primarily into Outbrain.

Outbrain is responsible in recommending articles and content to readers and is utilised by big news sites like Washington Post, Time and CNN. As a result, the SEA was able to redirect readers from the said news sites directly to stories and contents from SEA's very own Web site.

Washington Post, CNN and Time Statements

"The security of a vendor plug-in that appeared on CNNi.com was briefly compromised today. The issue was quickly identified and plug-in disabled. Neither CNN.com nor CNNi.com were penetrated directly," as told by CNN spokesperson to BBC.

The Washington Post, through its managing editor, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, told BBC that the hacking incident on Thursday was not an isolated attack on their Web site.

"A few days ago, the Syrian Electronic Army, allegedly, subjected Post newsroom employees to a sophisticated phishing attack to gain password information. The attack resulted in one staff writer's personal Twitter account being used to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message. For 30 minutes this morning, some articles on our web site were redirected to the Syrian Electronic Army's site. The Syrian Electronic Army, in a tweet, claimed they gained access to elements of our site by hacking one of our business partners, Outbrain.

"We have taken defensive measures and removed the offending module. At this time, we believe there are no other issues affecting The Post site," wrote Mr Ruiz in a statement.

A spokesman from Time, Daniel Kile, assured that although their content recommendation partner, Outbrain, was infiltrated, the Time's Web site was not directly affected by the SEA's infiltration.

"At this time it does not appear that Time has been hacked," he told the BBC, "but we are looking into it further," Mr Kile said.

In an interview of The Daily Beast with, "SEA the Shadow", the leader of the SEA, it was revealed that the group staged their hacking rendezvous in an answer to Twitter's deliberate campaign to obstruct the SEA's presence across the social media.

"Our account has been closed 15 times, We warned that we will hack the Twitter accounts of the mass media if Twitter closed our accounts again. They closed our accounts, and so we have implemented the threat. We want to see the world the truth about what is happening in Syria. There is no revolution in Syria, but terrorist groups killing people accusing Syrian Arab Army."

The Daily Beast asked the leader whether they will stop future hacks if Twitter leaves their account in peace.

"If Twitter stops deleting our [Syrian Electronic Army] accounts, we will not stop hacking, because there are other reasons," SEA the Shadow said.

The leader was also asked if the group is not afraid of NSA conducting surveillance over the group.

"I'm not worried. But sure."

The group also denied association with Assad but reveal that the SEA is made up of nine college students living in Syria. The leader said that they do not accept compensation for the effort they do but they just took it as their responsibility to let the world know what is happening in Syria.